Via Twitter: Never felt so demoralized n bullied from a game til 2day when i played my 1st @SmiteGame league matches. Horrible. Team placement is a joke

SMITE League Matchmaking is Terrible
Sep 6, 2014 7:28am UTC

UPDATE: This post was written prior to the SMITE matchmaking rework in late 2014.

Earlier I posted the following tweet, which I wholeheartedly stand behind.

"Never felt so demoralized n bullied from a game til 2day when i played my 1st @SmiteGame league matches. Horrible. Team placement is a joke"

Disclaimer (in case you haven't figured it out yet): This is a rant.

There's really two things I want to talk about here, but I'm only really going to get into one of them. I won't mention how conceited, vain, bossy, inconsiderate, and downright rude the players are. And the worst part is: none of them seem to see anything wrong with this behavior.

But alas, I'm not going to get into that.

The real point of this rant is to discuss what I've seen in my 3 (and probably only 3) league matches in SMITE in relation to matchmaking and how it [doesn't] work.

Let's get the facts straight:
The league play is broken up into 6 divisions (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master), each containing 5 subdivisions within them (V, IV, III, II, I).

To start playing ranked, you have to achieve player level 30 and master at least 16 gods. This takes a lot of time. It's far more difficult to achieve then say, performing 3 placement matches in StarCraft II. The point being that you've got a decent amount of experience under your belt when you get to the point of playing ranked. But what you don't have is experience enough to keep up at the Gold or even Silver league levels.

Obviously the concept of placement matches makes no sense in a game with teams of 5 randomly selected people, but the system that SMITE has put in place to select teammates and opponents is literally a piece of garbage.

Moving on...
The expectation would be that when starting out, you'd be put into "Bronze V" and have to work your way up to "Bronze I" and then into "Silver V" and so on...
This is the case.

The expectation would then also be that you are placed into matches with and against players who are in (relatively) the same division as you.This is NOT EVENT CLOSE to what happens.

So Hi-Rez Studios:You mean to tell me that on a Friday afternoon/evening you couldn't find 10 Bronze-level players to place into the same match after putting me in a 7+ minute queue???

Nope.

Apparently the best algorithm you can come up with places me with players 12 subdivisions higher than me and expects me to keep up, all the while combating constant harassment from them, which, mind you, caused our poor Bronze V Anubis in match 1 to actually quit the game because he couldn't take the harassment any longer. FANTASTIC experience for my first league match ever.

Here's a thought for you geniuses: IF YOU CAN'T FIND 9 OTHER PEOPLE IN THE SAME UNIVERSE AS MY RANK THEN JUST DON'T PLACE ME IN A #^(&!*@ MATCH AT ALL.

Spare me the demoralization, please.

You may argue that it's a good sign that I'm getting placed with people in the Silver and Gold leagues, but why would I want to play a game in which I'm almost guaranteed to do nothing but help lose because of the rank difference between me and my lane opponent. And what does that lead to? More team harassment, more demoralization, a loss for the Gold and Silver players, and a terrible video game experience in a section of this game which has basically ZERO in-game instruction, compared to the detailed tutorial videos and whatnot that span the rest of the product.

So to all of the Hi-Rez staff who were involved in the development of League play: Gee, you really hit the nail on the head with this one...
Sarcasm aside:Just because you put two Bronze players in the same match doesn't mean they will even see each other during the game.
You obviously don't want to attract new people to the ranked realm, because your system is an extremely effective deterrent for newcomers.